It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens

A decade of ethnographic research with American teenagers, dismantling the moral panics that adults project onto young people's use of social media. boyd demonstrates that teens are not addicted, naive, or reckless — they are navigating a social environment where physical spaces for unsupervised socialisation have been systematically eliminated, and networked publics are what remains. The book is a corrective to the shallow technodeterminism that dominates discourse about screens and children, grounding every claim in what teenagers themselves actually say and do. For product people it is a lesson in humility: the users you think you understand may be solving problems you have not even noticed. Free online from the author.